Ocean, air, road: One unified 10-step workflow
A customer calls to check the status of a container. You open one file to track the shipment route, another to review profitability, and a third to find the invoice. Meanwhile, someone on your team may have already answered the same question the day before without realizing it.
With Freight Forwarder Management, whether you handle ocean, air, road, or multimodal freight, every shipment in Odoo follows the same structured 10-step workflow, from draft creation to final closure. Automatic validation checks are applied at every stage to ensure that no shipment progresses with missing or incomplete information.
For companies managing high shipment volumes across multiple locations, this standardized process helps ensure consistent handling from one shipment to the next while reducing the risk of documentation errors, a common cause of customs delays.
From booking to invoicing, in one seamless process
Your operations team no longer needs to enter the same information in multiple places:
- Carrier bookings are created through a guided wizard that automatically pulls existing shipment data, leaving only the booking reference to be added.
- Cargo details can be loaded in a single click from a preconfigured template, with automatic volume calculations and dangerous goods validation.
- Invoices are generated directly from charges already recorded on the shipment file, eliminating duplicate data entry.
- Shipment profitability is tracked in real time, giving you instant visibility into margins even before an invoice is issued.
This seamless connection between operations and invoicing, fully integrated within the Odoo ecosystem, helps you identify underperforming shipments before they impact your monthly results.
Customers track their shipments while DG compliance stays under control
Every customer call requesting a shipment update is time your team could be spending on active operations. With Odoo’s secure customer portal, clients can track the progress of their shipments on their own, without creating an account or contacting your staff. You control exactly what information they can access, allowing your team to focus on the shipments that truly require attention.
When it comes to compliance, forgetting a UN number (United Nations identification number for dangerous goods) or entering an incorrect DG classification can be enough to delay a shipment at customs, leading to storage fees and costly penalties. As soon as dangerous goods are added to a cargo record, the module automatically checks IMDG regulations for ocean freight, IATA requirements for air freight, and ADR regulations for road transport, then alerts your team before a compliance issue turns into a customs hold-up.
The real value of Freight Forwarder Management goes far beyond digitizing documents. It brings together everything that is typically scattered across multiple systems into a single shipment record, including operations, profitability tracking, and compliance management. Instead of spending time searching for information across different tools, your team works from one centralized source of truth throughout the entire shipment lifecycle.
Want to find out how much time your team could save by managing each shipment from a single record? Discover Freight Forwarder Management for Odoo.